Sports Logo – Interactive Media Tools INM 101

For this assignment on the Interactive Media Tools subject we were supposed to re-trace a sports logo using basic shapes, pathfinder operations and the Pen Tool on Adobe Illustrator. I had some nice fun with this project since I still had a lot to learn on the mechanics of the Pen Tool and it was a great opportunity to put it in use.

I chose the Dayton Dragons’ logo as my subject, because it is such an interesting and intricate piece of illustration. Its limited color palette might seem easy to uncover at first, however I must confess that it took me a while (and some good planning) to get through the complexity of the paths.

First things first: the general outlines for the dragon’s head and for the letter work:

Then I started tracing the deep shadows, the darkest parts of the dragon. They were just ok, it took a little bit of time to go through all the steps, but nothing very hard:

Things got tricky with the scales, though. After a lot of trial and error, I used Pen to draw the midpoints of the scales, and then the Direct Selection Tool to adjust them accordingly. That was a hero combination and from then on things went really fast:

The medium shadows and highlights seemed easy, however I had to intersect them with endless shapes to make them fit to the general outline. Here is an example, the outline in blue and the highlights in yellow:

Here’s a gif of the final composition:

And here’s the comparison between the original logo and my tracing. Hope you enjoyed my workflow!